SHD partners with Schneider Electric for a new generation data center

"The modular concept, embodied by the bricks and air conditioning supply that will be added depending on the needs of future IT systems, is particularly suited to our business model and was the basis for the design of the data center.” – Sacha Rosenthal, President of the CFI Group

As more organizations transition to the cloud, new opportunities abound for IT service providers such as SHD (Solution d’Hébergement Durable), a subsidiary of CFI Group, located in the heart of the Rhône-Alpes region of France. Having noticed that hosting and cloud services accounted for 30 percent of their business in 2013, they decided to build a breakthrough data center that positioned their company as a major regional player in this space.

This required expansion of their support capabilities, specifically in relation to helping customer transitions to the cloud from start to finish. And with hard budget constraints, the CFI Group wanted an affordable solution that allowed them to scale up as needed to meet growth demands. They turned to Schneider Electric™ to build a “smart” data center based on a modular approach.

Modularity, efficiency, and high availability

Schneider Electric worked alongside SHD at every stage of the project, from design to final delivery, to build a new generation data center that reinvents the concept of modularity. “The modular concept, embodied by the bricks and air conditioning supply that will be added depending on the needs of future IT systems, is particularly suited to our business model and was the basis for the design of the data center,” Sacha Rosenthal says, President of the CFI Group.

Eco-performance and high availability were equally important requirements. So the Schneider Electric solution included innovative technologies that enabled the SHD Data Center to:

Achieve ultra modularity with the PowerTrain modules

Take advantage of indirect free cooling air with EcoBreeze™

Lower their energy footprint and PUE with StruxureWare™ for Data Centers software and suites